SOME people take umbrage at the message we are conveying about grass for our domestic horses.
They maintain they have kept horses for many years on the very pasture we are warning people against.
We do believe them – not everybody has frustrating 'issues' with their horses and there are people who have large acreages and lower stocking rates than the average horse owner at livery or on a small lifestyle block.
Sometimes they are owners who do have issues but don’t attribute these issues to the grass. Or, they are wise enough to be allowing grazing access when the grass is at a mature stage of growth.
Our CHH perspective comes from the fact that we are ‘the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff’ for the owners who are desperate because they cannot seem to get their horses right despite having gone down every treatment avenue known to mankind.
When you add up all the horses in the world who have been ‘diagnosed’ with the numerous array of Grass Affected disorders (EMS, IR, laminitis, obesity, hyper-sensitivity, anxiety, PSSM, HS, KS, SIJ, tight muscles, locking stifles, stringhalt, allergies, staggers, digestive, respiratory, reproductive and ‘behavioural’ issues) – it is a LARGE number of horses whose owners are looking for solutions that WORK!
We have a large data-base by now and there is a 100% correlation between all these ‘issues’ owners struggle with and the type of pasture/forage their horse has been on.
SO MANY horses are misread, misjudged and misdiagnosed. This can be very expensive when in the end, (many times after wasting years and thousands of dollars), they find out that simple changes to the horses diet would have worked in the first place.
A classic sign is not being able to make progress with ‘training’ because their horse was great yesterday but then seems to have gone backwards today. The real cause is often as simple as the fact that it rained in the meantime, causing changes to the nutrient composition of the grass.
Horses are frequently sold for the wrong reasons and the next horse purchased ends up with ‘issues’ too.
Countless horses are euthanised because no ‘physical’ cause could be identified. NOBODY thought to look for the physiological ‘injury’.
There is a spectrum of issues which range from mild ‘behavioural’ issues to very dangerous ones; from mild health issues to very serious ones.
MANAGEMENT changes which include changing the diet ‘from predominantly green to predominantly brown’ is what consistently works, along with addressing imbalances in their bucket feeds.
This change works fundamentally because it takes stress off the horse’s metabolism, giving it a rest.
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